COINCENDENCE 4

Around this same time my son had been taking art at his elementary school. It was common knowledge around the school as to who my son’s grandfather was because of his medical condition’s reports. Later that day when I picked up my son the art teacher who I had never met asked me about my father and family, I gave the usual answer of, “we never talk”. Next she went on to tell me how she was also the art teacher to a Glenn and that she was on her way over to her house in Mussel Shoals at that very moment.

Nothing is strange about this woman, however Glenn, the student she’s on her way to see just happened to be my sister in-law who I had never met, my half brother Tony Thomas’s ex-wife.

Still wondering,,, these next ones are classics

I went to work one day and to my amazement at my desk was this very hard looking 50 year old bald man with obvious years of prison wear written all over him. He said the GM told him to share with me until they set him up.

A few days had passed when he asked me about the picture of Danny Thomas in the drawer. I told him he was my father and the picture was part of a book I was doing.

Later that day we were standing around outside with others when he said to me, “Let me tell you about the time I met Danny Thomas.” I said, “No, let me tell you about it.”

He looked at me as though to say yeah sure but actually said, “o’k go ahead , but how the hell would you know about something that happened 40 years ago let alone I have never spoke of it since.”

What I said next turned this extremely hard looking man’s complexion into a pale of an exceedingly pale shade of white while he began to tremble with absolute bewilderment.

I told him how he and another boy were fighting in a gas station off Sunset when my father pulled up, got out of the car and separated the two of them. He then gave them a lecture about fighting and got back into his car and left.

After he regained his thoughts this man looked directly at me and said, “How the hell did you know that?”

I told him when I was a child my father would come and visit me from time to time though I didn’t know of him as my father but merely as a friend of the family, like the uncle you see now and then and I also didn’t know he was famous.

I told him that during this period I had been in a fight with another kid at school and when my father stopped by he sat me down and had a talk with me about not fighting. I told him my father said the boys name was Buddy. Now my father only talked to me about 3 Buddies. The first one was in my favorite movie at the time the love bug, Buddy Hacket, the second one was on my favorite show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Buddy Epson and then the last one was the boy who was fighting. So since the first two were dead and the fact that he was neither of those Buddies anyway then the Buddy he spoke of must have been the one in front of me.

Nothing strange about a father talking to a child about the rights and wrongs of life but in this case it just happened to be the person who would be sitting at my desk some 40 years later.